Why you can’t stop playing Flappy Bird

There’s a feeling that you get when your skills are perfectly matched against a difficult challenge. You become engrossed, even obsessed. Your entire world is focused on the task at hand. Your body responds to the perfect combination of frustration from the difficulty of the challenge and the sense of accomplishment from overcoming it. All great creative minds throughout history—artists, musicians, dancers, and inventors—have experienced this feeling while deep in the midst of their creative process.

It is also a feeling that some people get when they play Flappy Bird, the deceptively complex and addictive Smartphone game by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen that’s raking in an astounding $50,000 in daily revenue.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this feeling “flow.” It arises when there is a perfect balance between stress and reward. If the task that you’re engaged in is too hard and you don’t succeed, then your emotions swing in one direction: anxiety, anger, and frustration. If the task is too easy, you swing in the other: boredom and disinterest. When challenge and success are balanced, the result can be emotionally intoxicating.

Csikszentmihalyi developed his theory of “flow” by studying artists, inventors, and creative geniuses. After conducting hundreds of interviews, he found that creative people experience very similar feelings when they are deeply engaged in their craft. Different people describe the feeling in different ways, ranging from euphoria to a sense of oneness with the universe. The feeling’s often accompanied by a loss of a sense of time, or even of self.

He also found that the quest for this feeling is frequently part of the motivation that drives inventors and artists to create. The stereotype of the “tortured artist” is a popular one, and although there may not be any scientific evidence that artists are more maudlin than the rest of us, there is evidence that imaginative people use the act of creating as a way to regulate their emotions.